Malasz

Mick Rooney of The Independent Publishing Magazine offers a link to a Forbes article about a new indie outlet: Libiro . The article claims that Libiro is intended to compete with Amazon. One of the site's founders laments that indie authors get lost in the sheer volume of books offered by Amazon, not to mention the mammoth marketing budgets that the big publishing houses have at their disposal. No argument here, but there already is an alternate outlet for indie authors: Smashwords . Smashwords, for those unaware, offers indie authors (and small presses) a venue to sell their work as well as distribution to the major online retailers. Name the outlet and Smashwords probably distributes to them. While the site isn't without its problems (the manuscript upload engine is called the "grinder" with good reason), it provides a valuable service to indie authors. Unlike Smashwords, Libiro isn't offering distribution to major online retailer outlets. It intends to be an...

For those who don't already know, Smashwords is an all-in-one platform for authors to publish and distribute their e-books. It has its pros and cons for both writers and readers, which I don't have the time to go into right now, but it is very popular in the indie community. Authors who publish with them are able to track their sales and story sample downloads to gauge how well their works are faring on Smashwords. There's also aggregate reports of daily sales on other platforms that Smashwords distributes your work. But last year, Smashwords began collating all of that data to see if any patterns can be discerned from it or if its random noise. Every indie author should read the findings for themselves . The data regarding price point, title length, length of book, and sales are definitely very interesting and something to be taken into account when an author publishes their work. Anyone wishing to discuss it in the comments section, please go ahead! I've always had ...